World of Warcraft was the first game to receive the Apple Silicon treatment with the release of patch 9.0.2. At the time of writing in July 2021, there are just a handful of titles that aren’t ports. It’s early days for Apple Silicon, which means that there aren’t many games that have been optimized for the new hardware. Not everything has been updated, and most games are still only built for Intel Macs. Fortunately, Apple has updated its developer tools to allow developers to create universal binaries, which are optimized for both Intel and Apple Silicon models. Since Apple Silicon and Intel chips are fundamentally different in how they interpret software instructions, they can’t natively use the same software builds. The company has designed its own iPhone and iPad SoCs for well over a decade and is now applying the same approach and architecture to the Mac lineup. Apple is transitioning from Intel’s 64-bit x86 architecture to its own ARM-based systems-on-chip (SoCs).
